The June issue is here! Now available to read on believermag.com and in a store near you. Featuring: Lee Ellis on outlaw marijuana farmers in Humboldt County, Louis Chude-Sokei on P.T. Barnum’s “anicent” slave; interviews with Ken Baumann, Carolina López, Elif Shafak, and Peter Matthiessen; reviews of snowfall, Go, Dog. Go!; poetry by Rebecca Lindenberg, and more!

P. T. Barnum alternately described one of his earliest sideshow characters, Joice Heth, as ancient and as less than human. The fact that his audiences believed either story says something troubling about America.

“There is a side of me that is mystical or irrational. It tells me that we are merely scribes, that we don’t own the stories we write.”

Real Life Rock Top Ten by Greil Marcus

Ken Baumann interviewed by Sabra Embury “I feel like human beings were never meant to have such extreme attention. Ecologically, this edifice of culture that we’ve constructed totally supports a way of life that’s asymmetrical to what nature has built so slowly and surely.”

Kristen Iskandrian’s first novel, Motherest, is told in first-person by 18-year-old Agnes, who lives in “the middle of a New Jersey nowhere” and has just begun college in “the middle of a New England nowhere” in 1993.

I first saw Barbara Browning when she was naked, one hand extended to open a shower curtain, in our shared dorm bathroom, when we were both in our late teens. Barbara wore her hair short then, and her compact little body was so unapologetically whole, not a series of parts in the way I considered my own body to be.

In Visceral Poetics, poet Eleni Stecopolous' recent book on, among other things, struggling with chronic pain while trying to write a dissertation about Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopolous writes about her frustration with being undiagnosable.